Tamizh Kuil in the Indira Dock port area in South Bombay amongst the precarious housing which used to be home to Port Workers in the heyday of the Raj.

Bombay is home to historic Tamizh communities from the Tirunelveli area especially in the Bhandup and Dharavi belt. There are a few Mariamman Kuils scattered across the city. These are a part of a larger imperial entrepôt grid from Penang to Durban.

Over the last three years of living in/off Bombay, the city is a great muse, a character that provokes a genre by itself. Yet this city of stories is prone to an amnesia which I call the resilience syndrome or chalta hain, as people are on the move trying to survive. If anything defines this maximum city is it’s innate ability to sustain anything, 11/7 or 26/11 or the annual deluge, people are back to work the next day as the city means business, or dhando vado, a Gujarati speaking city in many parts with Bhojpuri the language heard more on the street.

This city is soaked in a history of trade and commerce, yet there is no time to note or remember it even while one passes by it in Fort or Colaba Causeway or Marine Drive. The cosmopolitan character is a function of its survival instinct, yet is rife with ghettos that sits uneasy with its larger than life idea.

I try to capture the present through an Indian Ocean lens, mapping the spots which are archives in the cityscape. The past echoes in the present only if one is trying to listen to it, in the Parsi joints such as Britannia, or on the stroll of the Marine Drive, which is an UNESCO heritage site.

The Al Sabah Mansion on Marine Drive speaks of an Arab Bombay where Kuwaiti merchants used to frequent prior to oil in the Gulf. Bombay was the capital of the ‘Other Raj’ (James Onley’s book) in the port cities of the Khaleej where the rupee was the legal tender until 1970.

Aden used to be a part of the Bombay Presidency, where Dhirubhai Ambani went to work in the 1950’s. Aden had a Gujarati Chief Minister, until the British pulled out giving Dubai the pole position. Adenwala Road in Parsi Colony, Dadar is a physical testimony to this history.

I write very slowly, and most of my work is long duree in nature, but I try to map the Indian Ocean, one image and paragraph at a time, and hopefully something valuable comes out of it.

Archiving An Indian Ocean Bombay

An honor to be a minor part of this pioneering carbon market social safeguards study by Transparency International Malaysia led by Mr. Yi Jian, Mr. Justin and Ms. Afrina.

Learnt a ton about the intersections of racial capitalism and carbon infrastructure in Malaysia and SE Asia. This was truly a learning by doing experience.

A Trip to Qom.

@cafemommyjoon is the best of Bombay, great food, lovely laid back Bandra vibes and a reminder to a syncretic Nehruvian Bollywood with the office of ex MP Priya Dutt, next door.

The Iranian Haleem and Bread was the highlight for me, and the bread pudding was a home run.

Haleem is a personal favourite as i search for it through KL to Singapore to Karachi Darbaar in the Gulf.

The Persian music was peppy and popular, a great foil for the vibe. This Sunday afternoon, the crowd is fashionable yet has an easy vibe.

The case for sustainability was never about ROI, it was about doing the right thing which guards reputational risk in the era of radical transparency due to the digital panopticon.

Impact is more than compliance as it adds more muscle to do well over the long term with patient capital.

The polycrisis is about restoration, regeneration and resilience. There are a number of layers to sustainability in an era of geopolitical black swans. SOPs and check lists are simplistic to capture anything meaningful.

When we think about EVs, it’s not only low carbon and clean air but think green jobs and critical minerals from Chile and Congo.

Time for framework jockeys in Sustainability are numbered as the turn towards more than reporting is here.

I read and write to engage with the life of the mind and not for the h-index as I am not gunning for tenure. And i have diverse interests from impact to Indian Ocean Tarikh to entrepreneurship to writing. I am working towards a PhD as well. My day job is as a venture builder in the impact space, and have worked in the policy realm for a better part of a decade in Singapore and KL. In India, I work with think tanks which contribute to governance and foreign policy discourse in the country.

Ideas and action can co-exist, life is a portfolio rather than a linear resume for the hiring algorithm with keywords. The era of AI is for zero to one, as only what is commoditised can be fed into a training engine. Identify problems and solve them, and a white space has not even been defined. The move from diagnostic to anticipatory is the big shift in our polycrisis world.

The issue with carbon markets is trust, and the only way to solve it is a robust social licence to operate through FPIC which is context driven and rooted in the voices of the vulnerable, and definitely not a tick box check. And it needs to be renewed at intervals. But it can be solved through trained critical social scientists who speak the languages of the community and thinking intersectionally are deployed, and use a range of approaches to understand needs and develop trust.

The problem with the offset market is the way they treat FPIC, as almost a headache to be outsourced to an NGO partner. These are vulnerable people with rich histories of hundreds of years. Carbon is stapled with water and biodiversity as President Tharman quipped, yet community is the wrapper of the bundle.

No AI bluster will help here, as there future of the planet is high touch rather than high technology purely not discounting tech based credits and power of MRV in the traceability equation. It’s time to be creative with FPIC, and solving for trust through intellectual rigor is the way to go, in case nature based credits need to scale.

This Saturday morning was spent with an enthusiastic group of image makers at the colourful Dadar Flower Market. The young men and women, mainly techies and start up wallah’s armed with DSLRs and Leica’s went out into the market with a gusto to hunt with trophy images. The market in the morning is buzzing with commerce and chaos, and the hum of the train with the Dadar Train Station next door. The photographers were often gently told off, and many did buy flowers. Yet, it did feel intrusive, and as ethnographers know well- the field has unequal power dynamics.

The urban is a theatre, and the colors of the flower market was a performance of the olfactory, and of the senses. The static image is unable to capture the fullness of the soundscape of bhojpuri dominating Marathi in the most Maharashtrian of Mumbai neighbourhoods- Dadar. The neighbourhood which is home to the Shiva Sena.

Flowers are conduits of the sacred and of celebration. Flowers are a part of the everyday. The images are a part of archiving of a Mumbai where the informal cash economy still dominates, and yet there were QR codes with many. We are not far from a time where flower tech, might be a buzzword. Ferns and Petals has created an online delivery marketplace.

As we image make, we often grapple with the neo-colonial politics of the camera lens or the smart phone, which is even more subversive when we land up to take images in a community in which we are not known. Is there a way, we can take consent in a street photography context? These are not mountains but people working for their living.

These are the questions that i think with today.

The Lawrence Wong Era in Singaporean Politics is here. A quick glimpse through the resumes of the cabinet members can inspire awe. The PAP state is technocratic with a policy wonk at the helm.

The commentator class is already chattering about 5G or the next generation of leaders. After his swearing in, PM Wong spoke about SG100, and that Singapore will prevail articulated with emotion.

The tariffs turbulence has set the narrative with an uncertain world, Singapore has an A Team with the intellectual capital to wade through the waves.

A P Sainath Masterclass on environmental oral history organised by the Qatar National Library live-streamed on YouTube is gold for researchers in climate change and environmental history as well as journalism.

A special shout out to Dr Sayeed from QNL for organising the workshop.

The whole day workshop touched upon archiving, decolonizing environmental histories as well as thinking of community research from below. Peppered with rich vignettes all through from swimming camels in Kutch to Seaweed farmers in Tamil Nadu the work of PARI, was shown.

P Sainath spoke on the value of looking at oral histories of migrants and the way climate change is really global warming, which opens itself to questions while climate change forecloses the potential to ask questions as there are four seasons a year, which normalises climate change instead of contesting the basis.

The various kinds of droughts was interesting to learn, meteorological, hydrological as well as a bureaucratic drought. The politics of data collection in the Indian bureaucratic system was an important reminder in to reading the basis of the data carefully.

The story of the Irish soldiers from Cork fighting the British alongside Indian soldiers in the 1857 mutiny, and how there were common colonial solidarities was simply mind blowing as an account. Mr. Sainath does not like the term best practices as well, as experts have caused a lot of damage in the realm of agriculture.

Oral histories matter as much as textual or architectural histories, especially in rural contexts where subaltern histories need to be recorded.